Enrico Appetito’s photos of Sciascia and the film ‘Il Giorno della Civetta’ are on show in Racalmuto

The Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia will be remembered in his Racalmuto, in the province of Agrigento, with the photographic exhibition ‘The day of the owl’, a collection of over 120 snapshots by Enrico Appetito taken during the shooting of the film based on the novel of the same name. The exhibition will be inaugurated on 25 June at the headquarters of the Sciascia Foundation and will be open until 19 September, not only in the premises of the foundation but those at the Regina Margherita theater and in the Town Hall, as well as at the Verdura Resort in Sciacca, with some images that will also be exhibited on the streets of the town of Racalmuto. ‘The day of the owl’ is the novel by Leonardo Sciascia who in 1961 introduced the mafia to Italy in a widely consumed fiction. In a 1972 edition, the writer added a warning in which he specified: “I wrote this story in the summer of 1960. At that time the government not only ignored the Mafia phenomenon, but explicitly denied it”. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the phenomenon of the mafia in Sicily was established for the first time at the end of 1962 and still today the courage and independence of judgment of Sciascia remain dramatically current.In 1968, ‘Il Giorno della Civetta’ also became a film, directed by Damiano Damiani and starring Franco Nero and Claudia Cardinale: the cinema was an important amplifier and the book reached an even wider audience. The exhibition takes us back to the summer of 1968, during the shooting of the film, from the Enrico Appetito archive, where over half a million images are kept, taken on the sets of more than five hundred films, made by directors such as Sergio Leone, Federico Fellini , Luchino Visconti, Mario Monicelli, Francesco Rosi, Roger Vadim, Jean-Luc Godard, Sergio Sollima, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento.